Comment

‘Big team’ science challenges researchers to revisit three issues around authorship: (1) how to define authorship-worthy contributions, (2) how contributions should be documented and (3) how disagreements among large teams of coauthors should be handled. We propose steps that the community can take to resolve these issues.

The ‘makeshift medicine’ framework describes how individuals address healthcare needs when they are unable to access the US healthcare system. The framework is applied to gender-affirming care, the health of people who inject drugs and abortion access. Recommendations for future research, advocacy and policy are made.

Governments make efforts to measure citizens’ wellbeing, and the indicators are constantly evaluated. Evidence across the social and medical sciences shows that pain is a socioeconomic, psychosocial and behavioural phenomenon. Governments should incorporate the systematic measurement of pain into metrics of wellbeing.

Behavioural science involves understanding humans. However, it fails if it develops a limited understanding of humanity — 17% of whom who live in Africa. Africa’s voice must therefore be included in behavioural science research. Collaborations with African researchers should be grounded in respect.

High-quality research requires appropriate employment and working conditions for researchers. However, many academic systems rely on short-term employment contracts, biased selection procedures and misaligned incentives, which hinder research quality and progress. We discuss ways to redesign academic systems, emphasizing the role of permanent employment.

The language used when reporting racial and ethnic disparities in vaccine intentions and uptake must evolve to reflect social and structural inequities. To achieve health equity, we must acknowledge the extent to which racism and health inequities serve as barriers to vaccine-seeking behaviours among people of colour.

Two publications have called for the redefinition of statistical significance as 0.005, or justification of the alpha. We argue that these papers expose a vicious cycle: scientists do not adopt recommendations because they are not standard, and they are not standard because few scientists adopt them. We call on journals and preregistration platforms to mandate alpha-level statements.

In Iran, women and men protest day and night for women, life and liberty. The moment has come for the international academic community to take action to remove the obstacles faced by Iran’s scholarly community, and join the call for equality, democracy and human rights.

Registration has been proposed as a possible solution to the reproducibility crisis in scientific research. In its more than 20 years of practice in biomedical research, registration has been valuable — but it is still largely limited to clinical trials, and its implementation is still largely inconsistent.

US universities have made public commitments to recruit and retain faculty of colour. Analysis of three federal datasets shows that at current rates diversity in US faculty will never reach racial parity. Yet, colleges and universities could achieve parity by 2050 by diversifying their faculty at 3.5 times the current pace.

Trophy hunting remains a high-octane debate for scholars and actors at various levels, including governments, lobbies, supranational bodies, local communities and broader publics. These actors are often driven by a range of competing interests. Bridging the divides will require collaboration and a focus on shared goals.

Applying behavioural science can support system-level change for climate protection. Behavioural scientists should provide reliable large-scale data that help in understanding public perceptions and behaviours. Governments should secure infrastructure for data collection and the implementation of evidence.

When sharing research data for verification and reuse, behavioural researchers should protect participants’ privacy, particularly when studying sensitive topics. Because personally identifying data remain present in many open psychology datasets, we urge researchers to mend privacy via checks of re-identification risk before sharing data. We offer guidance for sharing responsibly.

The low representation of academics with disabilities is a longstanding problem on which progress has been slow. Drawing on my research on disability-related barriers and my experiences of disability, I make six practical suggestions for how academic staff and people with disabilities can help make academia more disability inclusive.

Mental health, neuroscience and neuroethics researchers must engage local African communities to enable discourses on cultural understandings of mental illness. To ensure that these engagements are both ethical and innovative, they must be facilitated with cultural competence and humility, because serious consideration of different contextual and local factors is critical.

Data has tremendous potential to build resilience in government. To realize this potential, we need a new, human-centred, distinctly public sector approach to data science and AI, in which these technologies do not just automate or turbocharge what humans can already do well, but rather do things that people cannot.

When academics support refugee scholars, everyone benefits. Scholars who are refugees face complex challenges, including bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and academic barriers. Ahmad Al Ajlan discusses key steps that academic communities can take to support and integrate their refugee colleagues.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) already exist in several countries, with many more on the way. But although CBDCs can promote financial inclusivity by offering convenience and low transaction costs, their adoption must not lead to the loss of privacy and erosion of civil liberties.

Failure to consider the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion in biomedical and human behaviour research harms patients, trainees and scientists. On the basis of experience and evidence, we make actionable, specific recommendations on how equity, diversity and inclusion can be considered at each step of a research project.

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine showcases substantial challenges, especially to international humanitarian and criminal law and human rights. It also calls for an urgent revisiting of the role of the United Nations Security Council in the maintenance of international peace and security, and of the security architecture in Europe and worldwide.